Works by Mary Reid Kelly and Christine Rebet installed

[Left to right] Mary Reid Kelly, You Make Me Iliad, 2010; The Black Cabinet, 2007
You Make Me Iliad, a video that combines live-action performance and stop-motion animation, is primarily set in a brothel in German-occupied Belgium toward the end of World War I. Mary Reid Kelley posits the brothel as a metaphoric space in which wartime exchanges and moral compromises, sexual and non-sexual, are explored. The main characters in this work, a Belgian prostitute and a German soldier, are both portrayed by Reid Kelley herself. Their dialogue is written in a style that evokes epic poetry and is saturated with puns, rhyme, and wordplay. Christine Rebet's The Black Cabinet is a two-channel projection that simulates the exper ence of being in a Victorian parlor with a futuristic twist. In this installation's lower film, for instance, three men and one woman, in nineteenth-century garb, sit around a roulette table and subsequently engage in a series of parlor games that culminates in a séance. Rather than putting the characters in contact with spirits from their past, the séance prefigures the future twentieth century, characterized by despotic rulers.